What better way to celebrate turning 21 than by ingesting a life-threatening dose of poison?

That's the birthday treat of choice for many 21-year-olds, who proudly down 21 drinks in honor of the big day. Thirty-four percent of college men and 24 percent of women say they drank 21 drinks or more to celebrate their birthdays, according to a new study. That reflects the popularity of drinking games like "21 for 21," "drink your age," or the "power hour," in which the celebrant tries to drink 21 drinks between midnight and 1 am on his or her birthday eve. The maximum number of 21st-birthday drinks reported by a woman was 30, while the maximum for men was a mind-blowing 50.

"Children are better prepared for school if their parents read to them" sounds like the "duh" headline of the day. But keep reading—there's actually some useful news here.

Child development experts have known for a long time that reading to small children helps them learn new words and boosts early literary skills, like rhyming words and associating letters with sounds. About 50 percent of parents read to their children every day, according to Reach Out and Read, a Boston nonprofit. But it's the style of reading, more than the frequency, that really matters, according to a new review in the Archives of Diseases of Childhood.

What would you do if your teenager told you she was going to join the Mormon church? That question hadn't occurred to me, but a new book on raising teenagers, Like, Whatever, has given me a new perspective on how to make faith, and questioning it, a bigger part of our family life.

That's just one of the surprising finds in this parenting book, which I came across via the suburban mom mafia, having met editor Rebecca Kahlenberg through another journalist mom at my daughter's preschool. Rebecca's the experienced mother of four, ages 19 through 6, but she says that she learned new tricks in the process of editing the book—including the science of why it's critical that kids get at least 100 hours of driving practice with a parent in the car before heading off on their own, which she's now in the midst of with her 15-year-old.

I read the headline on the article—"Parental Psychiatric Disorder Associated With Autism Spectrum Disorders in the Offspring"—and thought, Oh, no! Back to the bad old days of the 1950s when "refrigerator moms" were blamed for causing autism. But the article beneath this scary headline, in the May Pediatrics, is good news, the kind that could lead to better understanding of the sources of autism and, eventually, effective ways to treat or prevent it.

Julie Daniels, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, looked at the health records of the parents of 1,227 Swedish children with autism who were born between 1977 and 2003. Those parents were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with schizophrenia as parents of children who didn't have autism.

Pamela Paul worked in marketing for seven years before becoming an author and penning books on starter marriages and porn. But it wasn't until she had her daughter (she's now the mom of two, 3 years old and 17 months) that she realized how marketing has hijacked parenthood. She writes about the mysterious lure of $800 Bugaboo strollers, wipe warmers, and baby sign-language classes in her new book Parenting Inc. I got the scoop from Pamela in a phone conversation from her home office in Manhattan. This is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

When did you first realize that becoming a parent now seems to require buying mounds of stuff?
When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was told: "You have to register." So I went online with Target, and I was just, what is this? What's this bouncy seat; what's this swing? I had no idea what I was doing. It really felt like I was not only new to parenting but to the whole parenting-consumer culture, which is its own separate thing.

Considering how much time we all spend watching TV, it's remarkable how little time scientists have devoted to figuring out what television does to us. Only recently have researchers started looking at how very small kids are affected by TV, despite the fact that Teletubbies, Barney, Baby Einstein, and other video fare for the pre-preschool set has been around seemingly forever.

Today marks the beginning of the 14th annual Turnoff Week, in which we're told to renounce television and computer screens in favor of wholesome activities like family dinners, reading, and sex. (Grown-ups only on that last one, please.) So it's a good time to catch up on what the research is showing. Harried parents, rejoice: The news is not all bad! TV, done right, not only keeps children out of our hair, it also helps toddlers and preschoolers with language acquisition and other skills. The bad news: The wrong kinds of shows slow acquisition of those skills, including reading. (If you want to think really bad, think TV in the kid's bedroom, which is associated with all kinds of trouble, from obesity to bad grades.)

Like all parents, I have a long list of prayers for my daughter's safety. One of the biggies is that she'll make it through high school without killing herself or someone else because she's driving drunk. Science now says I should worry not just about car wrecks but whether drinking at a time when her brain is forming its adult connections will make her sick, sad, and lonely for the rest of her life.

Drinking is part of teenage life—a part that can range from having one beer at a party every now and then to becoming wasted enough to pass out every Saturday night. Decades of prevention efforts and parental harangues haven't changed that picture much, despite increased recognition that teen drinking is a major cause of traffic deaths.